One Man's Notes

Richard Dansky

The best metaphor I’ve seen for AI is that it’s our generation’s asbestos. If you think about it, asbestos was this technological marvel that promised to solve a huge problem and that got crammed in everywhere. And yeah, it was good at keeping things from catching on fire, but it also came with an extremely elevated chance of painful, lingering death, and removing it from the system has taken untold years and billions of dollars.

Oooh. Nice to see @onionbagblog on here!

Cuckmere Haven this afternoon.

Managed to clear 100 GB or so of cruft off my aging, but still perfectly serviceable, M1 MacBook Pro, and it’s amazing how much better it performs with some free storage space again.

I’ve been listening on and off to the BBC Sounds investigation of Kate Clanchy’s cancellation a few years ago. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s much more nuanced piece of reporting than it’s being portrayed on social media. Two episodes in, it’s clear (to me, at least) that there are some very valid and quite serious criticisms of her work being made, and that she didn’t help the situation by not really engaging with them. (And, frankly, the publishing business comes out pretty badly.)

But it’s equally clear that many of her critics are unwilling to engage with the deeper consequences of the social media storm they helped stoke. There’s a line where criticism of the work turns into criticism of the author, and where criticism of a complaint turns into criticism of the complainer.

And, it’s at that point that any chance of a meaningful conversation about the work is done. Then it’s about good guys and bad guys and tribalism.

It’s very depressing. But riveting listening.

This is such a great story:

Meet the teen behind the Louvre ‘Fedora Man’ mystery photo

Love an eccentric.